Together We Will Rise
by dynamicsymmetry
Summary: They've lost everyone. It's just them now. But a world in which all they have is each other might not be such a terrible one.


**Author's note:** This was written back in March, to the prompt "Daryl and Beth, the last man and woman standing." The title is drawn from the song I used as mood inspiration - "Rise" by the Frames.

* * *

You move on. Sometimes. Until there's no moving on anymore and all that's left to do is stand.

He doesn't even remember how long ago it was, but they sat on a porch and she gave him a prophecy. She told him his future. It was horrible. He told her to stop. Would have begged her, if he could have managed that. Maybe she didn't know she was hurting him, because she was smiling when she said it, but it was an awful smile, or that's how he remembers it, so maybe she knew. Maybe she was fully aware.

Maybe she was just telling him the truth.

She just didn't tell him she would be with him.

So it might be okay. It might, at least, be something he could get used to.

Watching everyone fall away, after a while you stop crying. She told him that too, and for the most part she stuck to it, except with him. And she doesn't cry over the dead. She just cries over the lost. She cries over the things they'll never get back, the days and the hours and the minutes, all that time that slipped through their fingers like those much-cliched grains of sand. When he thinks about it, it comes to him that their lives have been full of clocks. Marked by clocks. Everywhere they turn, clocks.

Like hints. Like someone's idea of a joke.

They bury the last of their family together, dig the grave side by side and face to face. He cries. She doesn't. He cries because she was right, she spoke true prophecy.

Maybe she's not crying for the same reason.

* * *

 _Let's go north,_ he says in the silence after, sitting in front of yet another campfire. They're already pretty far north; two weeks ago they crossed the border into Massachusetts. But he says they should go north and he really means _north_ , because he's had enough of pretending the world isn't frozen and he wants some real cold.

There are practical reasons why, as well. But they aren't primary. She knows it without him having to say.

So she looks at him and she says _okay_.

* * *

Three solid months of travel after the last of their people are in the ground. They only find bodies. They never find anyone alive.

They agree between them, without speaking, that they're the only ones left.

* * *

This is a folktale, he's dimly aware; no student of literature by any means but he understands stories very well. He knows this is one people once told over and over: end of the world, last man and last woman, a post-apocalyptic Adam and Eve staring at each other across the wreckage of everything. He's aware that this has become an extremely prurient fantasy for some people: oh, well, time to repopulate the earth so time to screw like rabbits, and he guesses he can see the appeal, but he doesn't want to screw her.

Not like that.

He definitely doesn't want to repopulate anything. That would be awful.

That would be pointless.

* * *

North into the snow. He's not sure about it, because they don't follow the main roads anymore, but he could make a bet that they crossed into Canada about a week ago and he'd feel pretty good about the odds. It's winter now and the sun is lower, sliding across the horizon. He wonders about how it would be if they just kept going and going, hit the top of the world, stood there hand in hand and watched the sun set and not come up again for months. Live in the twilight.

Then live in the day.

There's a poetry in it that appeals to him.

Another thing that appeals to him is the fact that they haven't seen a walker in weeks. They actually find them dead now - really dead - and clearly no one has taken care of them. They just walked until they dropped and lay still. Can a walker die of starvation? After months of not eating, might that be an end to them? Or could they freeze? Could any of these things happen?

He sits in an empty house with a fire burning in a woodstove and her head in his lap and he considers the idea of a world where not even walkers still walk, where it really is just the two of them, the last man and the last woman in a empty world, and it seems like it wouldn't be that bad. A world full of people never really appealed to him.

He does miss their own people. A lot. It hurts.

But he doesn't cry anymore.

* * *

Heading across an ice field, packs, those pointed sticks hikers use, crampons. He found two pairs of snowshoes. They hit an REI that surprisingly no one had looted too badly and they stocked up. Food is really their only concern, but they're actually doing all right there as well. It should be more of a problem, because where they are seems to have been very sparsely populated, but there's also a lot of evidence that the inhabitants of these tiny towns and villages, against all good sense, panicked and crowded into their cars and fled toward the cities.

Idiots. Loss and gain.

The setting sun paints the ice into soft reds and pinks and purples. In the distance a line of deer cross, heads up, alert. He lays a hand on her shoulder, brings her up short. He has the bow in easy reach, but he won't use it now. He'll take this knowledge and keep it. There's life here. Life enough. Life enough, maybe, to feed them.

* * *

They both know, when they find the cabin, that it's time to stop.

Perfect. Pristine. Like the occupant didn't run, didn't take anything. Like they just evaporated and left everything in good order. A survivalist already, possibly. Cellar full of non-perishable food. Lots of distilled water. Good wood stove. No electricity, the place isn't even wired for it, but plenty of candles and lamps and oil. Outhouse, which sort of sucks, but whatever, they're used to worse conditions by now. Pump, and the water is sweet. There is, at least, water indoors.

There's furniture, couch and table and chairs, and blankets and furs, and there's a bed, and it's big enough for the two of them.

They unpack. Again not speaking, they agree this is for the last time.

The forest is silent. The sun is low. They bathe in water heated on the stove, wash each other slowly. They climb naked into bed in the dark, only the glow of the stove after the sun is gone. Looking at her face in that glow, kissing her, rolling her over and sliding into her like he's meant to be there. She wraps herself around him and whispers his name, and he trembles. Can't stop. Releases everything into her, the way he always has, and she takes him in.

Last man and last woman, not standing. Curled up together in the dark. Standing was never in the equation, he realizes just before sleep takes him. She was wrong about that part. They won't stand. They have nothing to stand for. It's just them now.

He's completely fine with that. Standing felt like sort of a lot of trouble.

Lying with her in his arms. When they're gone, that'll be it. It'll be over. Sun going down on them. But not on the world. There have been extinctions before. Maybe it was just time for another one.

They'll stand, such as standing is. And when they finally fall, the world won't miss them.


End file.
